Strap yourself in, because we’re going on a trip in the old CraftFail time machine – destination: 1986.

Here in 1986, friendship crafts are all the rage. Slumber parties have become little more than sweatshops where eighth-grade girls churn out friendship pins, friendship books, those barrettes with ribbon woven through them, and best of all, friendship bracelets.

We used to wear so many, by the end of summer when they finally fell off we’d have 3-inch wide tanless wrist cuffs where the sun hadn’t been able to break through the thicket of embroidery floss for months. Good times.

So imagine how excited I was when I was asked to write a friendship bracelet tutorial for Home Made Simple! I couldn’t wait to relive the days of my youth, creating stacks and stacks of bracelets with my kids (who love them, by the way – apparently like pegged jeans and neon clothes, these things are back in style). I pulled out my dusty old collection of embroidery floss, and set about relearning how to tie up these simple tokens of esteem. I mean, how hard could they have been to make, if my eighth-grade self could figure it out? I started working, envisioning the neat rows of knots I remembered so fondly.

I suppose it’s a good thing I don’t really have any friends to give my early attempts to; I’m not sure they’d appreciate my (ahem) thoughtful gesture. Luckily my technique improved and I remembered the secrets to friendship bracelet success before the article was due, but my first few tries were a tangled, twisted mess of too-tight and too-loose knots, and plenty of knots that weren’t even intentional.

Special thanks to my husband, who agreed to model my disaster before he realized I was going to tie it on with a triple knot and then pretend to be offended every time he mentioned taking it off (heh heh).

For more laughs, visit Robyn at Hollow Tree Ventures, where she wishes her kids were as interested in regular floss as the embroidery kind.

This is so epic. I remember making friendship bracelets out of lanyard myself. And also, those amazing pot holders (that my mother still has!) out of this spongey kind of rubber bands that you hooked onto a square pegged contraption. My four year old daughter got one of those pot holder things the other day. The instructions were in german… so I told her. I cannot figure that shit out!

@Jen, my daughter got one of those pot holder kits, too! I also couldn’t remember how to do it, so she looped them all together to form one loooooong string, which she zig-zagged back and forth across her room. She says they’re laser beams – now she’s practicing to be a spy. ;)